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Burning up the stage

He had national exposure as Steve on Nickelodeon’s hit children’s series “Blue’s Clues.” But Boyertown High School graduate Steve Burns was discovered by an agent while acting in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival 13 years ago. Now, after a hiatus from the stage during which he wrote and performed rock music, he’s back at the festival starring as Mozart in “Amadeus.”

It was 13 years ago, in the role of Thisbe — a young woman tragically in love with a young man behind a wall and played by one of a group of comic, theater-loving craftsmen in William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — that changed the life of Steve Burns forever.

The 1992 Boyertown High School graduate, then a student at DeSales University, earned raves for that 10-minute skit during the wedding scene at the end of the Bard’s comedy (he was terrific throughout the entire production as Francis Flute, the character who plays Thisbe), throwing a usually staid Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival matinee audience into hysterics.

“Those reviews helped me get an agent,” Burns said over his cell phone while driving from his home in Brooklyn toward the entrance of the Holland Tunnel in New York City. When he emerged from under the river, heading back to DeSales — the Lehigh Valley home of the festival in Center Valley — for a rehearsal of the PSF’s production of “Amadeus,” in which he plays Mozart, he talked about not having worked in the theater since then.

He did, of course, make something of a name for himself in his career-boosting turn as Steve on the Nickelodeon children’s TV series “Blue’s Clues.”

“The series began in 1996,” he said, “and I left in 2000. But my episodes ran until 2002. So let’s say it was six years. I made more than 100 episodes.”

Burns has not been on a stage to act since then — well, once, in an off-off-off-Broadway venture that was so dreadful he refuses to include it on his resume let alone talk about it.

So to go more than a decade without exercising one’s theater-acting muscles and then to take a flying leap into a role that may be one of the most challenging in contemporary theater is either courageous or awfully stupid.

At least, at first glance.

However, in the past seven years, he has had time to explore his other infatuation — his first: music. And that love drew him back to the stage to play a role that demands a keen understanding, intellectually and emotionally, of its subject.

“I hadn’t seen Dennis Razze in years,” Burns said of his “Amadeus” director, a professor at DeSales and a veteran of the PSF. But some time ago he received a call from Razze asking him to come back.

“I said, ‘I’ll come back when you do ‘Amadeus,’ ” he said. “Then two years later he called back and said ‘Guess what? We’re doing ‘Amadeus.’ ”

Between Thisbe and Mozart came some voice-over jobs and — oh yes: a stint performing and composing with the Oklahoma-based psychedelic alt-rock band the Flaming Lips, with whom he toured Great Britain as the opening act.

“There I was, playing with my favorite band in front of 5,000 people a night — every kid’s fantasy,” he said. “I have a wonderful friendship — personal and a professional collaboration — with the band. I performed on an EP with them. I’m in a movie with them. I wrote a song for them and they played it on their album, and it got great reviews in Spin and Time — but no one knew I did it.

“We recorded another on which I sing and play guitar. Music always has been my first love.”

His music, with contributions from the Flaming Lips as well, can be heard on “Songs for Dustmites” (2003) and on his upcoming “Deep Sea Recovery Efforts,” which also includes songs co-written by the Lips. (One can find more about Burns’ music on his Web site, www.steveswebpage.com/.)

So what Burns does bring to the role of Mozart is a passion for music — and that may just take him where he needs to go onstage.

“It’s one of the best roles in modern theater,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. And although he admits the play really belongs to Salieri — the Italian composer whose jealousy of Mozart’s talent drives him insane — the action is propelled by this ingenious man-child who created some of the world’s greatest music.

“It’s an athletic role, and I mean that in an emotional sense,” he said. “You have to go from moments of divine inspiration to utter despair to childish joy in four lines — in every scene. I’ve loved doing research on Mozart and his music. I’m very moved by it. I love the dark stuff, the work full of fear. I’m loving that. Truly, at this point I’m obsessed with it.”

Mozart may have received his inspiration from God, but Burns found his — in creating the role — from his ex-girlfriend and Keith Moon, the late drummer for the rock group The Who.

“My (former) girlfriend has this incredible laugh and childlike energy, which I’ve drawn from,” he explained. “And I think that Keith Moon is the closest to Mozart among modern musicians in so many ways. He was way too big for the room at all times. It was something he just couldn’t control. Yet he was terribly sad underneath, a very tragic figure.

“I looked him up on YouTube — which, by the way, has become a great resource for actors these days — and you can see how sick he was, and how scared.”

Aside from the role being emotionally daunting, its inherent physicality can take a toll as well. And at 33 — with “an awful lot of burritos behind me and a lot less hair” since his days on “Blue’s Clues” — Burns says the run-throughs are “really, really exhausting.”

“I’m jumping all over furniture,” he said. Then there are the legendary psychological demons tormenting Mozart.

“Terrible powers are driving him,” he said. “He’s at 150 percent all the time. I tell you, it’s terrifying. Probably after 13 years I should have started with a nice regional theater production of ‘You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.’ ”

Burns also has discovered another source of inspiration for Mozart’s relationship with Salieri in the play, and it comes from his friendship with Flaming Lips musician Steven Drozd.

“And in the play, that’s Mozart’s dynamic: casual access to divine talent. And that’s what drives Salieri out of his mind.

“I love that moral ambiguity in the play,” he said, referring to Mozart’s and Salieri’s sharing, somewhat equally, motivations both good and evil. Mozart’s social vulgarity, his naive boasting, his lack of appreciation for his incomparable abilities — these attributes could turn theatergoers against him. But Salieri allows those aspects of his competitor’s personality to bring out the worst in him, to allow him to rationalize his villainous behavior, to drive him to... but that would ruin the play.

“I sort of understand that professional envy,” Burns said. “Of course, not on that scale.”

All this talk of moral ambiguity brings up, of course, a short discussion on the recent controversial finale of “The Sopranos.”

Burns joked: “We’re actually cutting the last 15 minutes of the play and going to black.”

Not really. Although after some thought, he says he loved the way the series wrapped.

With “Blues Clue’s” behind him, his music and professional acting still an option, Burns feels good about the future. He purchased a garage in Brooklyn that he’s turning into a house. And, with some relief, he says almost no one ever recognizes him from his Nickelodeon days — not that he regrets the gig.

“I keep my head shaved and wear dark glasses,” he said. “And if someone is able to make that connection, well, so be it.”